> > > Not to fan the flames of this argument but having programmed mainframes, minicomputers and PC's as a general rule when communications (transference) of TEXT files occurs between systems then alteration of the contents is the norm NOT the exception paticularly for the control characters of which CR,LF and EOF are frequently manipulated and in the case of IBM mainframes and minicomputers where EBCDIC is the norm not ASCII then even so called standard chracters can be changed. Even in the PC world ASCII can change to support unicode, UTF8 etc and back again so alteration of TEXT files is pretty much to be expected with communication programs (which is what I consider MCOM, LAddieAlpha etc to be).
Now BINARY data should never be changed and yes if you were to transfer a BINARY file from say an IBM MAINFRAME to a PC (e.g a zip file) it would not be. So if you dont want changes emphasize that it is a binary file (If I remember correctly this is also true with FTP). P.S I got bitten be an alteration bug just a year ago. Migrating a number of offices around the world to a new datacenter worked except for SAO PAULO, MONTREAL and SEATTLE where a critical production application (out of maybe 100 or so bein run) failed. It took 2 months with those locations remaining on the old datacenter connections at a very large financial cost to determine that a WAAS network compression device configuration was off enough to corrupt data transmission for the application that failed. So messing with the data could be anywhere - even your router/ISP connection. -Winston
